Sussex Veteran Cherishes 'Honor Flight' Experience

This is the first of two Honor Flight stories to appear this weekend. Return on Sunday for the story of Arthur Kuether.

He was just 17 years old when he enlisted in the Navy.  It was 1943 and America was in the throes of World War II. But 85 year-old Floyd Ferguson of Sussex says he has no regrets about his decision to join the Navy. 

“It was the best thing I ever did in my life because I wasn’t too happy going to high school,” recalled Ferguson, a native of East Chicago, Indiana. “You could join at 17 and get out on your 21st birthday.  If you waited until you were 18, you had to be drafted.”

Ferguson was later trained as a flight engineer in the Navy Air Force while flying in a patrol bombing squadron in San Diego.  In 1944, he joined Air Evacuation Squadron One, shuttling wounded Marines from the battlefields of Japan to hospitals in Honolulu. His plane, the Coronado “Flying Boat,” was converted into an air ambulance.  The four-engine bomber was remodeled to accommodate 25 stretcher patients and was based in Saipan.

“We were flying the wounded Marines from the battles of Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa,” said Ferguson.  “They wouldn’t let us go to Iwo Jima to pick up the passengers because there was no protected harbor. So we had to stay on Saipan and they brought them back on the hospital ship.  Then the hospital ship could empty out and we parked a squadron of seven planes, one leaving every day to fly back to Honolulu.  That was a three-day trip going back because the patients had to be taken off the plane, put into bed for the night and then we’d fly to the next island.”

About a year later, the air ambulance missions ended and Ferguson was sent back to California. While on leave and on a train bound for Chicago, he learned that the United States had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

“The first one was dropped almost before we left Oakland,” said Ferguson. “My parents lived in Washington, DC at the time. When I got there, the war was over.  I was on a date at a theatre in downtown Washington, DC, and all over a sudden they turned on all of the house lights and they said, ‘The war is over. Japan surrendered!’

After Ferguson’s tour of duty ended in 1947, he became a school teacher and taught for 30 years including 24 years at Boys Tech High School in Milwaukee. He still cherishes memories of his military career and naturally, when he had a chance to join his fellow veterans on an Honor Flight to Washington, DC, last year, he was very excited.

Some 6,000 people were on hand to cheer and salute the vets at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee on Nov. 6, 2010.

“It was a really nice trip,” Ferguson said with a big, wide smile. “They had a Delta 747. When we left I got a nice surprise. One of my daughters was one of the volunteers to guide us to the plane.”

Once in our nation’s capitol, Ferguson remembers the veterans getting the royal treatment.

“They loaded us into four big tour buses and we had a police escort,” said Ferguson. “We didn’t stop for any traffic lights.  They took us to a lot of places including the World War II memorial. That was the big stop, the main thing to go and see. It was fantastic and I found the Wisconsin marker.  We also went to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Korean War Memorial, and the Viet Nam Memorial.”

The Viet Nam Memorial held special significance for other reasons, too.

“I was a teacher in Milwaukee and when I was looking at that Viet Nam memorial, I’m thinking, ‘I must know some of those’ because I had a lot of students over the years,” Ferguson explained.  "There were a lot of names on that wall and if I would have had the time to really look them over, I might have recognized some.”

The Honor Flight experience is one that Ferguson says he will never forget. And, as Americans contemplate the sacrifices of this country’s service men and women, he hopes those sacrifices won’t be forgotten, either.

“I think most people appreciate our service because when you stop and think about it, freedom is not free,” said Ferguson. “They’re the guys that paid for our freedom that are honored by those memorials.”